Machine translation of locative prepositions is difficult, even between closely related languages such as English and French. We investigate translating the three prepositions in, on, and at into the French prepositions dans, sur, and à. Often, in corresponds to dans, on to sur, and at to à. This correspondence, however, is not perfect: in a number of cases, the uses of these prepositions were observed to differ from one language to the other. These cases are not simply exceptional. Following recent work in cognitive science, we use the notion of conceptualization to account for this problem. A conceptualization (or metaphor) is a mental representation of an object or an idea. We believe that the differences in the uses of locative prepositions are caused by differences in the way objects are conceptualized in English and French.
We have implemented a system that translates sentences involving one of the locative prepositions we studied from English to French, based on this idea. In addition, our system is able to detect ambiguities, as well as errors and abnormalities in input sentences.
" }